breadmaking – previous tries…

A little confession first, I have tried this before. I was craving homemade bread around Thanksgiving weekend 2013 and this happened to coincide with the second weekend I had ever spent with Handsome’s family, so I was understandably nervous and reverting back into my foodmaking cocoon. As usual, I was waking up at 5am with my mind ticking through recipes and I got up to try making Jamie Oliver’s banana honey bread and Nigella’s rosemary bread.

Both were an absolute disaster. I think this was actually because we were at Handsome’s family river house, which is chilly inside, especially at that time of the morning, and I couldn’t get the dough to rise. It may have also had something to do with my using hand hot water, instead of room temperature water, but really we’ll never know. What I ended up with was a chunk of rock hard doughy rosemary bread (they said it tasted good, but let’s be fair, rosemary DOES taste good, even if it is in a nasty pastry doughy crust), and my honey banana bread was also doughy and very heavy. We threw it out. Kudos to the Handsome family for saying it tasted nice… they are full of Southern charm and manners… I hope it didn’t give them a stomach ache!

So if you are nervous, and if you have no idea if you can make bread, do what I did, buy a breadmaker, and if it doesn’t work, blame it on the breadmaker… that’s what I’m doing!